Posted on 08/20/2002 8:04:39 AM PDT by Leisler
The language of leftism is out of date. It desperately needs reconstruction and revitalisation, if the Left is ever to regain its proper status as a voice of ethical critique of materialistic modern society.
As a registered Democrat who voted for the fringe-left Ralph Nader for President in 2000, I am well aware of the decline in prestige and effectiveness of leftist organisations since their high point in the 1960s. The large demonstrations against globalisation two years ago, for example, made scarcely a ripple in the US and have already been forgotten. One problem is that too many leftist periodicals are run by callow cliques whose vaunted populism is a mask for snobbery.
Leftist analysis has been slow to adjust to the massive expansion of the service sector after the Second World War. In the US, salaries of skilled manual labourers have long exceeded those of mid-level office staff. Leftists consistently misinterpret mass media and new technology, which they treat with paranoid theories of manipulation and “commodification” coined by writers schooled before the Second World War (before the birth of television).
The communications revolution has blurred traditional class lines. But the Left still doggedly invokes paradigms from early industrialisation, applicable today only to the Third World. It finds “oppression” under every rock and reduces contemporary society to rote battles of the “powerful” and the “powerless”.
The Left is wilfully blind to the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism. Over the past two centuries capitalism has raised the standard of living and enhanced the health and life expectancy for untold millions in the West and elsewhere. It has stimulated new ideas and fostered free speech.
When they call for the redistribution of wealth, leftists are endorsing an authoritarian system that, wherever it has been tried, has resulted in economic stagnation and a sapping of cultural energy. Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long. The play of the market, rather than government engineering, is more reliable for long-term job creation. When jobs are varied and plentiful, ethnic and racial tensions diminish.
Only a lunatic fringe on the far Left is still calling for revolution, a smashing of the social order, but it must be acknowledged how widespread that idea was in the 1960s. Most leftists do believe that, without them, the naive proletariat would wallow for ever in ignorance and slavery. Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege.
The crisis of the Left was signalled 20 years ago by academe’s retreat into post-structuralism — an elitist, jargon-filled methodology practised by literati with scant knowledge of history. In the US, liberalism too is confused, alternating between a genteel humanitarianism credulously craving government programmes to an overtly Machiavellian power politics.
Because the Left has been programmatically anti-business, it has been unable to reform the business practices that generate prosperity in the West. A strong, articulate Left could have roused public resistance to the Marie Antoinette corporate culture of the past 15 years, which climaxed in recent revelations of monumental fraud.
As smaller companies were swallowed up in transnational conglomerates, plant closings produced superficial cost-cutting, rewarded by skyrocketing compensation for top management. Boards of directors went limp, while stockholders were helpless. An honest, respected Left would have been well positioned to render aid when and where it was needed.
The most radical task facing contemporary leftism is a purgation and reclamation of its own rhetoric.
You must remember logic is not one of the lefts stronger points.
I agree with this, but she still manages to express some germane observations. She, like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Walzer, are progressives that have enough clarity of thought to recognize the rot within their own ranks.
Regarding the Nader vote: Remember that this is Camille P, kookie Iconoclast, avowed aethiest and admirer of Paganism. That she would opt for the hopeless Nader vote as a protest and not GWB is understandable.
Check out Tammy Bruce on Frontpagemag.com! What a radical transformation of a once fire-breathing leftist Feminist.
Abortion.
As with most otherwise nearly intelligent females, her intellect vanishes in visceral irrationality when that issue arises...
Paglia is a fun read, but she is wildly inconsistent. Like many of us, she bought into a whole lot of drivel in her youth, but even in late middle-age she can't bring herself to admit it. So she endlessly goes on about the hallowed 60s (it's a rare column when those days are not mentioned), but at the same time uses her rapier sharp mind to fillet the dunces who still take the politics of that time seriously.
Somehow Paglia's voice seems a little less forceful to me in these post-911 times. I'm not sure if it's because my perceptions of the world have altered radically, or if something in her voice has gone hollow. Maybe I just don't give a damn about fashionable straddlers like Paglia anymore.
Should be: ...the dunces who try to take the politics of that time into the present.
Her biggest problem is that she always writes as though nobody has ever heard of her before. As a result just about every article she pens is burdened with formulaic "Who I Am" passages. I can't even count how many times I've heard her begin a sentence: "As a registered Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader for President in 2000 ....."
I'm gonna have to bookmark this one...
Bottomline she is saying that the left has to purge the old clique [They wont willingly change. That would be an acknowledgement of lifelong error.] in order for it to regain a powerbase. Her salience reveals the internal struggle that will keep the left hamstrung for the next twenty years while Conservatives appoint Supreme Court justices and federal judges across the land [The real power].
Prayerfully she will be attacked from her own ranks as opposed to embraced.
Another very real factor that cannot be shrugged off but by Contrarian Conservatives is the left's unwillingness to acknowledge God [As He is] and submit in anyway to him.
Not acknowledging the ultimate reality...God...leads you down a path where you become resentful of other realities until bitterness and eventually willful blindness sets in.
I believe it is from this well that their hatred ultimately flows.
I hear her next article is about the world being round instead of flat.
I guess you're right. No conservatives would agree with statements like this:
"The Left is wilfully blind to the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism. Over the past two centuries capitalism has raised the standard of living and enhanced the health and life expectancy for untold millions in the West and elsewhere. It has stimulated new ideas and fostered free speech."
Hear...Hear I've always noticed that beneath every liberal is an elitist snob.
Uhhhh??? Everyday Dems in congress and leftists speak despicable language. snobbery? hardly! Snottery it is, just like this article which in fact is a front for promotion of leftist snottery on TV and in mainstream (not even leftist) periodicals.
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